With it being 9 weeks until last frost here in zone 5b, we are 1 week away from getting into full fledged gardening season. This week was comprised of caring for seedlings we’ve already planted and getting some garden beds prepped for transplants.
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If you haven’t been following this series you might be asking yourself “How can you be planting already in zone 5b?”. Well the answer is simple. We have a greenhouse that we use to extend our growing season.
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Seed Starting:
We weren’t planning on starting any seeds this week but we did have to start some. Unfortunately we had some of our basil seedlings wilt and die either from over watering, or it being too cold.
We aren’t exactly sure what caused some of the basil to die while some of it is fine. I wanted to add this to this weeks entry to show how things happen sometimes in gardening. Nothing is ever going to work exactly how you plan it.
There is still plenty of time for the new basil starts to grow to be everything we want them to be.
We also had a couple of our Goji berry starts die so we started a few more of those. One Kale we transplanted last week died due to a broken stem so we started another one to replace it.
Our Rosemary that we started 2 weeks ago still hasn’t germinated. I’ll give it another week, and if it doesn’t sprout by next weekend, I’ll be impatient and plant some more.
Transplanting:
We didn’t do any transplanting this week.
Pruning:
We didn’t have any pruning to do on live plants, but we had to clean up some garden beds to get ready for spring.
Everything we grew in our greenhouse last year was left in the garden beds over winter. This week I went in and cleaned out both garden beds to get ready to start sowing seeds next week.
We had dead lettuce, basil, peppers, and dill that needed to be cleared out. The lettuce, basil, and dill had lots of seeds still on the plants so after I cleaned up the beds I spread the seeds out to start the growing process for this year.
After the garden beds were prepped, I gave them a good soak with the garden hose for about 20 minutes. One disadvantage to the greenhouse is over winter the garden beds dry out so they need to be re-hydrated in the spring.
On the outside of our greenhouse we have our herb garden that needed a prune. Cutting back oregano, sage, and thyme either in the fall or the spring helps promote new growth.
After pruning the garden herbs back I noticed the oregano, thyme, and our chives have already started to grow which is definitely very early for our location.
The last thing we pruned this week was our Asparagus garden bed. An asparagus plant grows out into a large fern when harvest season is over. This gives energy back to the roots. Once the fern dies back and is fully brown, cutting it back lets the new growth emerge in the spring.
Weather:
It was another unseasonably warm week here in southeaster Ontario. We had a high of 17°C (63°F) on Monday, and it stayed warm the rest of the week. The lowest daily high was 7°C and the lowest nigh time low was only -3°C.
At the end of the week we also had a very large rainstorm which has dumped almost 2 inches of rain in 2 days.
Next week the weather is staying warm. The weather forecast has several days of double digit weather with sunny skies and no daily high below 8°C.
Upcoming Next Week:
We’ll be starting peppers, and onions that will eventually go into our outdoor gardens. In our greenhouse we will be direct sowing carrots, spinach, beets, and lettuce.
I also plan to prep our spring wheat garden bed to get that planted in the next week or two.
This concludes this entry into our gardening this week series. We hope you enjoyed it and we hope you will subscribe and follow along with us on our journey. Also, be sure to check out our other blog entries where we have growing guides, seed saving guides, and recipes. If you have any questions or comments please leave them below.
